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Upon re-reading my post I need to clarify my example about the psychological test question “I’m no different from my parents in being alcoholic”. Keep in mind that the testing psychologist rarely has any background information about your parent’s or their history of alcoholism, and there is no question prior to this confusing one that asks whether or not one or both of your parents are alcoholics. Back to the question, to answer ‘True’ is obvious admission you are an alcoholic, (if you and your parents are actually all alcoholics). But if none of you are alcoholics, your answer would still be ‘True’, which is then misconstrued to be an admission you are all alcoholics. To answer ‘False’ can also be admission of you being alcoholic in the way that it can be misconstrued by the psychologists if they arbitrarily choose to “believe” your parents are NOT alcoholics. And how do you answer the question if only one of your parents is alcoholic but not the other parent?!

This question is a prime example of just how confusing the questions are, and again, every answer on these tests can be misconstrued and manipulated to suit the psychologist’s personal agenda. As well, it is always each individual’s perception of the question that influences their answer, and we don’t all read/understand the question in the same manner. On its face a question may seem very simple until you stop to analyze it and realize the problems, which they don’t want you to and is obvious by the way they rush you through the tests giving you very little time to think about what the question is really asking. The questions that had double negatives were complicated and quite hard to understand. All in all, they find a way to “diagnose.” Of course if you give negative type answers you easily get a diagnosis, but even if your answers show a positive attitude towards your illness/life circumstances, they then accuse you of “underreporting in order to avoid a psychiatric diagnosis” and use that as justification to label you with a psychiatric diagnosis anyway! They tell you when you write these tests that you shouldn’t worry because “there is no wrong answer”. Believe me, EVERY answer you give is used against you in one way or another. And because I asked a few questions about the “loaded” questions, such as why there was no answer option between the 2 opposite extremes of “I am never sad” and “I am sad almost all of the time”, my report stated I was uncooperative during the testing and would therefore be “treatment resistant”!

One thing I would advise everyone to do if ever in our situation, is that since the courts allow the Defence psychological interviews to be videotaped, we certainly took advantage of that for our own protection and are very lucky we did, because the videos show countless relevant omissions by the psychologist which would have been favorable to us, and countless misconstruing of what was actually stated, for example, several specific “quotes” were used by the psychologist in my report of me saying things during the interview I absolutely never stated.

The main thing that I was trying to point out in telling our story is that in our case, despite all of the concrete medical evidence to the contrary, we were designated by Defence psychologists to have Somatization Disorder (my daughter) and Undifferentiated Somatoform Disorder (myself). That was able to be done under the much stricter DSM-1V guidelines. The SSD category in DSM-V will surely be disastrous for all.